The whole chronology of Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth is quite screwy. Wang Lung and O-lan are married at the time when the first peaches appear, but their first child is born sometime before the harvest that same year. There’s one possible explanation for that, of course, but you’d think even naive Wang Lung would be suspicious :dubious: The first three children sure seem to be born within a three year time span, and the twins perhaps two years later, but they apparently age at different rates; the oldest sons are behaving like adolescents while the twins are still portrayed as quite small children.
Give me a break.
Thoday worried that Deacon was going to die of exposure or thirst. It never occurred to him that the peal would kill Deacon.
Robert Lewis Stevenson’s “Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde” starts out at 3:00 a.m. in February. Mr. Hyde knocks down a child and a crowd gathers.
Why all these people were out on the street at 3:00 a.m. in February is never explained.
I’ve never thought of that as a mistake. It’s common in northern European mythology that when the living interact with ghosts/faërie/little people that time does not run smoothly. When the living break off contact with the other side, they may find that what seemed to them to take a long time actually took no time at all in this realm, or that what seemed only a short time of interaction actually took several hours. Shakes may just have been following this traditional view.
Think of it as a precursor to general relativity.
Sorry, this makes even less sense to me. Keats was pretending to be ignorant in order to be ironical?
Does opera count? Puccini had Manon Lescaut and her lover exiled to the “deserts of Louisiana”.
But for true weirdness, try Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, about the assassination of the King of Sweden, after political pressure forced him to reset it in colonial Massachusetts. Riccardo, “Governor of Boston”, is warned of the plot by Ulrica the fortuneteller, but fails to escape the dagger of Ankerberg. His last official act is to pardon his killer as he lays dying.
Please, let’s not get into all the pulp SF about humans colonizing Venus that was written before we knew it was eight hundred degrees down there.
Ah, but “desert” doesn’t necessarily mean a dry sandy area.
From the American Heritage Dictionary:
Puccini may have had meaning # 3 in mind, given the time Manon was set in.
I’m not familiar with this opera, but Louisiana can refer to all of France’s holdings that eventually got sold as the Louisiana Purchase, and this includes lots of scrubby badlands and deserts including those in Utah, Wyoming and the Dakotas.
With one or two exceptions, every state in the union has some desert land. I don’t believe Louisiana is one of the exceptions.
Frankenstein really is loaded with errors. Another classic occurs when Shelly has the doctor sail into the sea off the Shetland Islands to dump the remains of his work. He is unable to return to land, and after much panicking and falling asleep, he wakes up in Ireland. Apparently he drifted the 1000km journey, and all to no avail, because the Irish immediately arrest him when he lands.
Well, we *are * examining an English translation of an Italian libretto adapted from a French novel, so errors can creep in. The relevant Puccini text in Manon’s death scene is:
Grieux:
E nulla! Nulla!
Arinda landa…
non un filo d’acqua…
O immoto cielo! O Dio,
a cui fanciullo anch’io
levai la mia preghiera,
un soccorso,
un soccorso!
Manon replies, in part
Sola, perduta,
abbandonata…
in landa desolata!
Orror! Intorno a me
s’oscura il ciel…
Ahimè, son sola!
E nel profondo
deserto io cado,
strazio crudel,
ah! sola abbandonata,
io, la deserta donna!
Ah! Non voglio morir!
No! Non voglio morir!
Funny, I thought the only places the French colonized in the original Louisiana territory were along or near rivers. But opera and romances follow their own logic, don’t they?
Anyone who wants to read Abbe Prevost’s novel l’Histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, upon which the opera is based, for the original French phrasing is welcome to. Get back to us on that, will you?
Abbe Prevost died in 1763, when Louisiana was still huge and encompassed much of what we know as the American Midwest (including the badlands and deserts of the upper Missouri River, which at least some enterprising Frenchmen checked out). But if he ever referred to “the rolling mesas of Bed-Stuy,” we’d have him nailed!
You can have my diamond-powered-brigantine-specially-modified-to-traverse-the-luminiferous-ether-of-interplanetary-space-and-to-withstand-the-torrid-climate-of-the-Venusian-swamps when you pry the tiller from my cold dead hands.
I’m fairly certain Frankenstein names his creation Adam.
I think it’s pretty clear that he was just describing it that way. If you’ll recall the passage, the three spelunkers get glimpses of the parts before they see that it’s just one creature. An icthyosaur does kinda look like that. At the time, they still hadn’t had that lucky accident where a glass of water spilled onto one of those slate samples containing icthyosaur skeletons revealed the carbonized the remains of the skin. So they didn’t know the icthyosaur had a dorsal fin, or that it had a fish-like tail (The tail of the skeleton goes into the lower “fluke”, but gives no indication of being part of a fishy tail, so they used to think it had a reptilian tail, and that it “broke” on floating dead specimens, creating that odd jog in the tail.) I don’t know why they thought it had to turn over to eat.
I’m sure that Verne didn’t really think a plesiosaur had a turtle’s shell, either.
By the way, Shelley never says that Frankenstein created his creature by stitching together dead bodies. Victor is silent about exactly how he created his creature (whom he does not name.)
Yeah, looks like he wasn’t named, or at least not named Adam. I searched the Project Gutenberg ‘Frankenstein’ for “Adam” and only got references to the biblical Adam.
Here’s the text btw: http://www.gutenberg.net/etext93/frank14.txt
Nah. “Or like Balboa” would have scanned just fine in place of “Or like stout Cortez.”
or… they could turn them around…
Did Puccini write the lyrics of his operas? 
Did Puccini write the lyrics of his operas?
Luigi Illica and Domenico Oliva, librettists. Which probably discounts opera from classic literature; usually the music is terrific, however the librettos are barely coherent.